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Overview

From New York Times best-selling powerhouse Roxane Gay, Ayiti is a powerful collection exploring the Haitian diaspora experience. Originally published by a small press, this edition will make Gay's debut widely available for the first time, including several new stories.

In Ayiti, a married couple seeking boat passage to America prepares to leave their homeland. A young woman procures a voodoo love potion to ensnare a childhood classmate. A mother takes a foreign soldier into her home as a boarder, and into her bed. And a woman conceives a daughter on the bank of a river while fleeing a horrific massacre, a daughter who later moves to America for a new life but is perpetually haunted by the mysterious scent of blood.

These early stories showcase Gay's prowess as "one of the voices of our age” (National Post, Canada).

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Product Details

About the Author

Roxane Gay is also the New York Times bestselling author of the memoir Hunger ; the story collection Difficult Women ; the novel An Untamed State , which was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; the essay collection Bad Feminist ; and several comic books in Marvel’s Black Panther: World of Wakanda series. She divides her time between Indiana and Los Angeles.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Ayiti :

“The themes explored in Gay’s nonfiction, such as the transactional nature of violence and the ways in which stereotypes of poverty add another layer of dehumanization, are just as potent here. Even her more lyrical mode is filtered through a keen sense of the lost promise of one country and the blinkered privilege of the other. It’s Gay’s unflinching directnessthe sense that her characters are in the room with you, telling it like it isthat makes her irresistible.”  Vogue

“A set of brief, tart stories mostly set amid the Haitian-American community and circling around themes of violation, abuse, and heartbreak . . . This book set the tone that still characterizes much of Gay’s writing: clean, unaffected, allowing the (often furious) emotions to rise naturally out of calm, declarative sentences. That gives her briefest stories a punch even when they come in at two pages or fewer, sketching out the challenges of assimilation in terms of accents, meals, or ‘What You Need to Know About a Haitian Woman.’ . . . This debut amply contains the righteous energy that drives all her work.”  Kirkus Reviews

“There is a chance that Roxane Gay has published something great every day for the last few years. That’s why it’s shocking thatalthough this will change in 2014, when she has two books slated for publicationthis incredible little collection is her only proper book to date. When we make a new version of this list in five years, we imagine it will include several of her works.”  Flavorwire

“Haiti has long been the most interesting country in the Americas. Its [Haiti’s] better scribes, among them Edwidge Danticat, Franketienne, Madison Smartt Bell, Lyonel Trouillot, and Marie Vieux Chauvet, have produced some of the best literature in the world. Add to their ranks Roxane Gay, a bright and shining star. Ayiti is an exciting new chapter in an old and beautiful story.” Kyle Minor, author of In the Devil’s Territory

“Gay. . . rests her stories between worlds, where the unrefined meet the formal, where the beauty of poetic language is never fully swept away from the dirt and grit of honest and genuine moments . . . A debut that feels more like a veteran.”  Monkeybicycle

“These are powerful stories written with verve and there’s this great sense at the collection’s close that nothing will stop the Haitian people, the human spirit, or Roxane Gay.” Ethel Rohan, author of Cut Through the Bone

From the Publisher

2018-04-03A set of brief, tart stories mostly set amid the Haitian-American community and circling around themes of violation, abuse, and heartbreak.This debut collection was first published by a small press in 2011, before Gay became a household name as a fiction writer, essayist, and memoirist (Hunger, 2017, etc.). Republished with two new stories in 2018, much of it reads like a rehearsal for her more ambitious work, though it's worth exploring in itself for Gay's sharp-elbowed flash fiction. One of the new stories, "Sweet on the Tongue," echoes the plot of her debut novel, An Untamed State: A woman visiting her native Haiti is abducted and raped, beyond the help of her wealthy husband, and the shorter version emphasizes how difficult it is to articulate an assault in its immediate aftermath. The tension is equally dramatic in the closing "A Cool, Dry Place," in which a Haitian couple plans to make a dangerous boat trek to Miami, struggling to decode both the mythology of America and their own difficult relationship. Usually, though, the stories are brief and intimate: There's a lesbian relationship in "Of Ghosts and Shadows" ("We are the women people ignore because two women loving each other is an American thing"); American tourists sexually fetishize Haitian women in "The Harder They Come"; and a new arrival to America is taunted in the schoolyard in the opening "Motherfuckers." This book set the tone that still characterizes much of Gay's writing: clean, unaffected, allowing the (often furious) emotions to rise naturally out of calm, declarative sentences. That gives her briefest stories a punch even when they come in at two pages or fewer, sketching out the challenges of assimilation in terms of accents, meals, or "What You Need to Know About a Haitian Woman."Gay has addressed these subjects with more complexity since, but this debut amply contains the righteous energy that drives all her work.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

I expected a great deal from Roxane Gay's collection of short stories given her terrific reputation and universal praise from the readers I trust the most. And, she did it. From the very first line through the last of this magnificent collection of short stories, Gay weaves a sensual, sensuous world with heartbreaking beauty, passionate love, and unbelievable violence, and hardship. In fluid, agile poetic stories, she sketches the experience of Haiti as a country, a home, and a distant idea. I fell in love with so many characters, people with so little that they turn to one another rather than evade consciousness with television, delicious food, air conditioning, and beautiful clothing. With each singularly beautiful story, she builds a reality that reflect a world that few of us know but all of us live in and share.